It used to be that if you wanted to corrupt your government so that you could gain a business advantage, it took a while. You met some politicians, you made some donations, you "entertained" folks. Legislation was introduced. It might take several tries before it was passed.
What I see now is that the system has granted itself so much administrative discretion that you can use government as a direct agent in trying to kill your competitors. The threshold for getting the big stick of the government out and whacking your competition is so low that you're presented with multiple choices: go for their domain name. Find a violation of the thousands of various codes they must comply with. Use your patents to start a patent war. And so on.
The beauty of this way of doing things is that the more you either screw somebody else over or get screwed over, the more you end up doing all the corruption activity that you used to have to do on the front end -- but this time it's to be left alone. So in this case we have people pleading with their Congressmen to try to get the system to work correctly. We've switched from corrupting a somewhat honest system for your own purposes to paying off a somewhat corrupt system in order to be left alone. Based on this, I predict political campaigns will continue to draw exponentially more money as things progress.
Interesting times to live in. We obviously need a secure, private, P2P domain name system.
"We obviously need a secure, private, P2P domain name system."
We obviously need the government to respect the laws and the Constitution. Technological fixes are not the solution to corrupt government. If the government can't seize someone's domain, they can still seize their assets (as in the Megaupload case).
We need to get the government to respect our rights and the Constitution and we need to make it hard for the government to violate our rights. The two aspects go together. Much as one might like this just to be about convincing politicians and bureaucrats to do the right thing, making it harder for these politicians and bureaucrats to do the wrong thing needs to be part of the process. Oddly enough, I think the framers of the constitution understood this.
And Megaupload had the technical problem of a single point of failure. Peer-to-peer is more robust - it still can be shutdown too but it's still worthwhile to make things hard for would-be censors.
Among human-readable adresses, .bit/NameCoin could be better but it isn't too bad. Something like half of all BitCoin miners are also part of the NameCoin network now, so it's more secure than you'd imagine given its actual adoption.
Readable isn't the issue IMO, typable is. You can brute-force a pretty onion domain beginning with a few letters you choose, but nobody can remember the random numerical garbage following it.
What I see now is that the system has granted itself so much administrative discretion that you can use government as a direct agent in trying to kill your competitors. The threshold for getting the big stick of the government out and whacking your competition is so low that you're presented with multiple choices: go for their domain name. Find a violation of the thousands of various codes they must comply with. Use your patents to start a patent war. And so on.
The beauty of this way of doing things is that the more you either screw somebody else over or get screwed over, the more you end up doing all the corruption activity that you used to have to do on the front end -- but this time it's to be left alone. So in this case we have people pleading with their Congressmen to try to get the system to work correctly. We've switched from corrupting a somewhat honest system for your own purposes to paying off a somewhat corrupt system in order to be left alone. Based on this, I predict political campaigns will continue to draw exponentially more money as things progress.
Interesting times to live in. We obviously need a secure, private, P2P domain name system.